I hope you can put some of these things together better than I did, you may have heard that my Brother or I did not finish School or no one tought me one thing about Typen but that I know I know it, Smile. My God have blessed me to be here my three scores and ten.

In 1975, Gurtie Fredieu wrote a two-page letter recording the family's history for the first time. The 70-year-old's simple sentences contained snippets about ancestors who'd been slaves in the tiny community of Cane River, La. It offered a peek into the family's riveting past - the murders, suicides and forbidden love - and concluded with the hope that somebody, someday, could "put some of these things together better."

That somebody is Lalita Tademy. And 26 years later, she's made her cousin Gurtie's wish come true.

Tademy, 52, of Menlo Park, used her cousin's letter, more than a thousand archival documents - and her own rich imagination - to write her first novel, the 418-page epic "Cane River" (Warner Books, $24.95).

The book, which made The Chronicle's best-seller list, traces her mother's side of the family through four generations of women - Elisabeth, Suzette, Philomene and Emily - from pre-Civil War plantation life through the Jim Crow days of the 1930s. It's a fictional account based on as much fact as Tademy could find, and it's earned her hundreds of media interviews and book readings around the country, including one tonight at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park.

The heartening journey into her family's past began six years ago during what many deemed a mid-life crisis. After all, Tademy, who never married and has no children, had reached the high point in her corporate career - she was a vice president and general manager for Sun Microsystems in Palo Alto.

She'd worked toward the position ever since earning bachelor's degrees in psychology and statistics at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1970, then a master's in business administration in 1972. ("I just liked the whole concept of profits and losses," she said. "There was a clarity.")

Sometimes, in the middle of an important meeting at Sun, Tademy would think about her great-grandmother Emily - or Grandma 'Tite (rhymes with sweet) as everyone called her. Tademy, who grew up in Castro Valley as the youngest of four children, spent her summers at family reunions in Louisiana. She never met Emily, but her relatives filled her head with stories, often comparing the elegant woman to Jacqueline Kennedy.

"It was always how wonderful she was, how beautiful she was, how vivacious she was, what a love of life she had . . . that she had her own farmhouse and invited people in every Sunday, that black and white people would gather under her roof," Tademy said.

But the real Emily didn't match the simple, perfect picture her family painted. Tademy learned that Emily dipped snuff, drank homemade wine like water, danced to music from her old Victrola, harshly judged other blacks with darker skin and died in 1936 with $1,300 hidden in her mattress.

Tademy, who'd always had an interest in genealogy, wanted to know more about Emily's past. She knew Emily's mother's name was Philomene, but didn't know anything about her or the women who came before.

After three years at Sun, Tademy yearned for a change. The job came with prestige and stock options. But it also came with 80-hour workweeks with no time for friends, playing racquetball, experimenting in the kitchen or any of the other things she loved.

And so, she quit.

And (gasp) she had no idea what to do next. To her family and co-workers, who'd watched her work her way up for years, her decision seemed, well, a little nutty.

"It isn't as if there were a lot of women, let alone African American women vice presidents," Tademy said. "There was a lot of bewilderment. And then 18 months later, when I said I was going to write a book, that's when people's eyes rolled back in their heads."

Her colleagues sometimes looked at her incredulously, surprised that someone so dedicated to advancing on the fast track would leave corporate life behind. But they also had a tinge of jealousy, according to John Kannegaard, a vice president at Sun Laboratories, which is a division of Sun Microsystems.

"She was ferocious," he said. "You know what these jobs are like - you get up in the morning and go to bed thinking about it. The next thing I know, she's decided to quit and go do, you know, whatever.

"There's a certain amount of envy, getting off the playing field, away from the everyday pushes and pulls, the meetings every 30 minutes, having two people on hold and somebody paging you and two people outside your door. You think, maybe that would be a good thing to do."

Her mother, Willie Tademy, 79, of Oakland, didn't see anything good about her daughter's choice. She was simply dismayed.

"I thought it was a bad decision, because whenever you've got a job, you don't leave it unless you have another job in the wings," she said. "When she said she left, I sort of blew up. I said, 'What are you going to do now? Where are you going?' "

Tademy didn't have the answer, but she did have some money in the bank and the gut feeling that leaving was the right thing to do.

Gone were the frantic days packed with meetings. The 150 e-mail messages filling her in-box every morning. The unconscious glances at her calendar every 15 minutes to see what she was supposed to do next.

But instead of lounging in the sun on long, glamorous afternoons, she found herself holed up every day in the National Archives and Records Administration's building in San Bruno. She finally had time to pursue her hobby and find out the truth about her family.

"I'd get up and say, 'OK, gorgeous day out. Should I go to the beach? Should I drive to the mountains?' But I'd go to the archives and look at microfilm, looking for any clues about my ancestors," Tademy said. "It got very obsessive, just finding one more piece of data, one more something that would open up the door for one more. It was like being a detective."

When she maxed out her resources in San Bruno, she knew where to turn next: Cane River itself. She took six trips there over the next few years, usually staying three or four days. She visited colleges, public libraries, courthouses and the local genealogy society. She delved into mounds of letters,

newspapers, deeds, wills and land claims.

She talked to anybody she could to learn more about the 19-mile stretch of land along the river in central Louisiana and its complicated society of Creole French planters, slaves and gens de couleur libres, free people of color, who were often richer than their white neighbors and sometimes owned slaves themselves.

Tademy also spent a lot of her time just walking, admiring the land and trying to understand its moods, which she described as "haunting and beautiful. "

"It's a really unique part of the country that pokes at a lot of stereotypes that I had going in about slavery," she said. "My perceptions when I started were: Slavery? Bad. White people? Evil. Black people? Victims. There was so much gray in Cane River that I had to step back."

A lot of that ambiguity came from the mixing of whites and blacks on the plantations. Many of Tademy's ancestors had very light skin and some moved away from Cane River in an attempt "to pass" as white, she said. Many of her ancestors were the children of black slave women and white men - some the product of loving relationships and others the product of rape.

She learned about Emily, who loved a white man. He loved her, but married a white woman for the sake of propriety. Questions of desperate suicide and jealous murder swirled after his death.

She learned about Emily's mother Philomene, who stopped speaking after her true love, a black slave, was sold away to another plantation because of a white man's envy. Though forever devastated, Philomene later came out of her shell with a renewed determination and vigor for the sake of her children. She learned about Philomene's mother, Suzette, who was raped by a white man, and Suzette's mother, Elisabeth, the matriarch of the brood.

On one trip to Cane River, Tademy hired a genealogist who helped her find the most crucial piece of research: the bill of sale for her great-great-great- great-grandmother, Elisabeth. It proved conclusively that her ancestors were slaves, rather than free people of color.

The genealogist waded through thousands of private, historical documents collected by the DeBlieux family, which lived in the Cane River area. The private collection, which wasn't indexed or ordered in any logical fashion, was kept at a New Orleans library.

"In the space of about an hour, I covered every possible emotion," Tademy said. "At first, it was just a huge piece of the puzzle I'd been looking for for a year-and-a-half. And then I had to think about what I was holding and that was people selling people. Then it was, 'How could this be?' "

The bill, written in 1850, had 30 slaves' names and ages listed down the left side and their buyers and prices listed down the right. The bill, reprinted with many other documents in the book, lists "Slave, Elisabeth, Negress age 48, not guaranteed, to Narcisse Fredieu, $800." After the owner of their plantation died, his widow sold Elisabeth, her husband, their four children and four grandchildren to seven different plantations.

"The family had been ripped apart," Tademy said. "Brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters. That was just so difficult to digest. And realizing these are my ancestors too, it was just enormous."

Tademy wasn't able to trace her family back any further, and has no idea where in Africa they came from or when they arrived in the United States.

In 1997, she settled back down in her spacious, airy Menlo Park home, decorated with African and African American artwork, and began writing. She took writing courses at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. She spent nine months working on the first draft, writing it all long-hand because she found typing on the computer stifled her creativity. ("It was that blinking cursor," she said with a laugh.)

"In my head, I lived on the plantation, and then I lived through the Civil War, and then I lived in Reconstruction and then I lived in the Jim Crow South, " she said. "It was always very personal, and I think that's something that's an added complexity. I was these women, but on the flip side, they were me. I really felt them as ancestors, not just characters I made up."

Tademy found it painful to write about the murders and rapes of her own family members, but included the harsh scenes to keep her story factual. She also struggled with the fact that some of her genes came from the rapists themselves. Her great-great-grandfather Narcisse Fredieu is one of the most vicious characters in the book, but Tademy began to see him as a flawed product of the brutal system of slavery, rather than an evil, one-dimensional villain.

He bought Elisabeth and later fell in love with her granddaughter, Philomene. He was responsible for ensuring Philomene's true love, Clement, was sold to a faraway plantation. The two lovers, and parents of two girls who died of yellow fever, never saw each other again. Fredieu fathered Emily and her seven siblings.

"I went in thinking every slave holder was a demon - cruel, insensitive - and the slaves were victims that you're supposed to feel sorry for," she said. "That robs both sides. The further I pushed, the more complicated things got. I started to see slavery as an evil institution that held everybody in its grip."

When Tademy completed her draft, she realized the hard work had just begun. She sent her manuscript to 13 agents and was rejected each time. One said her characters weren't compelling. Other reasons were even harder to hear.

"One said slavery had been done," she said. "That was very discouraging, it stopped me in my tracks for a while. But then it occurred to me that love had been done. It's all about how you do it."

Finally, she found an agent, who in turn found a publisher. Tademy's spent the past several weeks touring England, Canada and the United States doing book signings. She's stopped in big cities and small, from New York and Chicago to little towns in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee.

She's read mostly at independent bookstores - and one beauty salon. Unfortunately, she didn't have time for a pedicure before rushing off to her next reading. She's been interviewed by TV host Bryant Gumbel and on CNN.

Though an appearance on Oprah seems like a natural fit, it hasn't happened yet. "You don't call Oprah," she said. "Oprah calls you."

In addition to some adoring fans, Tademy has met legions of distant relatives on her book tour. At almost every stop, she'd had people approach her and tell her how their family trees connect, sometimes with branches intertwining as far back as the 1700s.

"People will say, 'I'm in your family, let me tell you how,' " Tademy said. "They'll find literally one line in the book, like, 'That doctor you wrote about as being the first on the scene of a murder brought me into this world.' Or, 'I went to your great-grandma's farm in Louisiana and she stopped a nosebleed.' "

Tademy's been pleasantly surprised at the book's appeal to blacks and whites, men and women. Men have tended to like the book's rich history and women have tended to appreciate the complex relationships, she said.

"If folks pick it up and read it and they're just really drawn into a part of history that they weren't very familiar with, and they want to turn the pages, I'm really satisfied," she said. "Above that, I think it's a story of the strength of family, of resilience, of making the best of what you have."

As for her next career move, Tademy is unsure. She hasn't ruled out returning to corporate life, but for now, she's happily working on her second book. It tells the story of her father's side of the family in Colfax, Louisiana. This time, it'll follow the men's stories.

"An author's life is very solitary and that part is sometimes difficult," she said. "I think about how stimulating it was to have so many smart people around (at Sun Microsystems), but I enjoy this."

Those smart people now think Tademy is the wise one. Kannegaard admitted he was initially nervous to read "Cane River" because he didn't know what he'd say to Tademy if he didn't like it. But he loved it, his daughter loved it and now their copy is circling among family friends.

"I don't think she'll go back to high tech," he said. "I think that she's found what she was put on Earth for. We're all sending e-mail around, we're all so proud.

"We used to be the high-tech muck-a-mucks . . . Now we're the people who know Lalita."

He said he may attend one of her readings and knows just what he'll say when he sees her: "I'm going to remind her of the time that she was a lowly vice-president and general manager of one of the top technology firms around."

Tademy's family, too, couldn't be prouder. Though some have struggled to read about their own painful past, they're glad they have it beautifully packaged forever. Her sister, Joan Lothery, lives in Philadelphia and loved getting phone calls from Tademy with updates on her research.

"We have storytellers, but we didn't have any real writers," Lothery said. "This made it very nice that some of the stories that were passed on could be memorialized in print. I think I like that best of all."

After Tademy's mother got over the initial shock of watching Tademy quit her prestigious job, she enjoyed seeing her daughter devote herself to the reading and writing she'd loved as a girl. Tademy was called "The Little Genius" growing up, with her head always buried in a book.

"She was the best - and not because she was mine," her mother said. "Oftentimes, I would have her in the car, and I knew that she was bookish, so someway I had to get her out of that. I would see a building or something and say, 'Look at that, Lalita!' And then she would look up, see what it was, not say a word, then look back down at the book."

And what would the women of Cane River think of their story reaching the best-seller list?

"I'm not sure about Emily, she was private," Tademy said. "I think Suzette would be a bit perplexed, and I think Elisabeth would just be very proud. Philomene, I have this sense she wanted the story told. I think she'd be pleased."

Though Tademy has no family of her own - and said she couldn't have dedicated herself so whole-heartedly to the book if she did - perhaps "Cane River" is the greatest legacy she could leave.

"I wanted to give these women a voice," she said. "It was also important to me that I tell their stories, not apologetically, but just what really happened. It's down, it's down now. And long after I'm gone, it'll still be there."

Oh, and as for Cousin Gurtie, she died several years before she could see her two-page letter spun into a best-selling novel. Tademy met her once on a trip to Louisiana with her father and was struck by Gurtie's chatty, sometimes wandering family stories. Tademy assumed she exaggerated for effect, but now she knows she didn't.

"I wish I'd gotten to know her," Tademy said. "I think she had lots of stories that go beyond those two pages."